Intro – the case that I choose to research is roe vs wade. In 1970 a women named Norma McCovey was pregnant with her third child and wanted to obtain a legal abortion in Dallas TX. The only way to do this was to claim that she had been raped because it was illegal to have an abortion for any other reason. The problem was she had not been raped and the unauthorized facility had been closed done by police. This lead to her to seek the help of Linda coffee and Sarah Wedington, two attorneys who would argue the case. In June of 1970 under the alias Jane roe the two attorneys presented her case to h supreme court. The defendant in the case was Dallas county districted attorney henry wade. The court didn’t actually make its decision until January 2nd until 1973, and voted in favor of roe with a 7 to 2 majority vote. Justice harry Blackmun wrote the court’s opinion which stated that “Abortion is a fundamental right under the united states constitution, there by subjecting all laws attempting to restrict it to the standard of strict scrutiny”. Justice Blackmun rejected the argument that a fetus has a right to life. A trimester frame work was created to protect the mother’s health and protect the “potentiality of human life”. So this basically meant that from the …show more content…
They both agreed that there was no historical precedent for the court’s decision. They said that there’s been “no constitutional warrant for imposing such an order of priority’s on the people and the legislators of the state”. Furthermore justice white said the court should not involve itself in the issue of an abortion by creating “a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human rights by investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it. It was the belief of the justices that the fourteenth amendment was never intended to be used in that way by the drafters of the